T3 May: Unit Review Ideas

With finals week just around the corner, teachers are beginning to wrap up the semester with activities that sum up themes and concepts from this year. At this May T3 meeting, we specifically discussed different types of study guides and review games. Here is a snippet from our collaborative session:

Study Guides & Practice Tests:

How to Study for “This“. Provide students with a study guide that is broken into different themes & concepts. Within each theme, explicitly describe “How to study for __Ex: Literary devices _” by explaining physical steps that students can take to achieve mastery of a theme or topic (Sarah Tunik, English Department).

Draw It. Students are given a list of prompts, which they then use to physically draw out pictures and symbols that demonstrate processes and conceptual relationships (LaQueitta Hill, Science Department).

Practice the Test Questions. In preparation for standardized tests — something we cannot escape– the format of the final dictates how students should study for the test. For example, teachers can help prepare students by practicing and teaching intelligent guessing through the process of elimination (Romeo Baldeviso, Math Department).

“I Can” Checklists. Provide students with a checklist of “I Can” statements. By framing statements into actionable items, students not only know what they are being tested on, but also, what they will need to be able to do. Ex: Chinese Numbers – I can write numbers 1-100. I can read numbers in Chinese characters (Rita Yeh, World Languages Department).

Proficiency Chart. Students use a chart to self-evaluate their familiarity with content using a proficiency chart. This allows students to identify and focus on topics that need the most attention (Anton Brammer, Science Department).

Build-Your-Own-Guide. Students create their own study guides, which the teacher then looks over and fills in the missing pieces, scaffolding and guiding their topics of review. This allows for students to initially consider the importance and relationships between overarching concepts on their own (Dr. Ming Wong, Science Department).

Review Games:

Baseball. In this classic review game, two teams compete against each other as if they were playing baseball. One team pitches the questions, while the other team advances bases by answering single, double, triple, or home run-type questions (increases in difficulty) or “strikes out” by missing questions (Annette Counts, Library Department).

Scavenger Hunt. In this scavenger hunt activity, students use their notebooks and resources in the Schoology course page to locate information related to various themes and concepts (Kate Cunnane, English Department).

Station Rotation. Groups of students rotate among “learning centers”—self-contained sections of a classroom where they can engage in various collaborative, directed, and/or independent learning activities (EdSurge 2017). Here’s how Molleen uses Station Rotation(Molleen Dominguez, Religious Studies Department).

$25,000 Pyramid. A pyramid with terms is displayed in front of the room. A student, “the guesser”, sits against the projector display so that he/she can’t see the pyramid, while two other students sit in front of the guesser facing the pyramid, “the clue-givers”. The clue-givers can provide hints or the teacher can provide them as shown in this sample pyramid. Depending on the competency of the class, allow 60-90 seconds to guess all six clues on their team’s turn. (Brian Cushing & Patti Harjehausen, Social Studies Department).

Survivor. This review activity is modeled off of the reality TV show where participants are voted off an island. Each team of students are given ten minutes to write a paragraph about a given prompt. One team will line up, and the two on the ends will read their responses. The audience votes on the better response, explains why it is better, then one student is booted off. The process continues until there is only one student remaining. This task teaches students what you expect in a paragraph response, gives students an opportunity to solidify and formalize their thoughts onto paper, as well as reinforces important concepts (Dr. Laura Ramey, Religious Studies Department).

Celebrity. Based off of this Celebrity Guessing Game typically played at parties, teams cycle through 3 rounds of one-minute mini-games (taboo, charades, and 1-word clues). These team games are fast-paced and repetitively drill concepts through words, actions, and associations. To prepare for the game, the teacher writes relevant course topics, themes, authors, titles, etc. onto separate slips of papers and places the slips into a hat. One group member from the active playing team draws a slip, and provides clues to the team member via one of the mini-games, and team members guess what is written on the slip. For greater review potential, all slips return to the hat for the opportunity to be drawn again (Kate Cunnane, English Department).

Kahoot!. Many of our teachers already use Kahoot! in class, but Pham uses it particularly as an ungraded, formative assessment that prompts discussion. With Kahoot!, you aren’t limited to text-based questions, but you can also import images, audio, and GIFs (Thien Pham, Art Department). Another way to have students practice on their own is by making the game public and assigning Kahoot! to students for homework. This new feature allows teachers to track and review student results. (Dr. Zack Polsky, World Languages Department). Dr. Polsky also recommends automatically assigning names to students if you want an easy way to track users.

Socrative. Similar to Kahoot!, students have a rocket ship in Socrative that moves across the screen when students submit correct responses. While students seem anonymous to each other, teachers are able to view an administrative dashboard.

The session ended with an exciting raffle to win Schoology swag (Thank you Schoology and Bridget Heaton!). We appreciate all of you who participated and contributed to T3 this year! It wouldn’t be the same without you. Really.